Interdisciplinary Studies of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects

Google Tech Talks
February, 25 2008

ABSTRACT

We all love to hate large software systems. They are hard to build,
hard to evolve, and don't work very well. Why is this? A lot of reasons,
some social, some technical, and some socio-technical. We believe that OSS
provides an excellent source of data to test hypotheses about the factors
that affect important phenomena/outcomes in software projects. Our group
at UC Davis, comprising bio-informaticians, organizational behaviourists,
physicists, and software engineers, is using a range of different approaches
to the analyze the veritable torrents of data pouring out of open source projects
to understand how things work in OSS, and what tools and techniques can
help. One important issue is IMMIGRATION: how do new people
join projects, and how can we help the difficult intellectual and social
challenges they face. We present two results:

1.a) Can we build "recommender" tools that help programmers deal
with "information overload" by helping them focus their attention?

1.b) Such tools have always been evaluated with user studies. Can
we do something more quantitative?

2) What are the factors influencing immigration of new developers in Open source projects?

Joint work with: V. Filkov, A. Swaminathan, G. Hsu,
and students C. Bird, Z. Saul, and A. Gourley

We gratefully acknowledge support from NSF (Science of Design and
Human and Social Dynamics Programs), the IBM Faculty Fellowship Program,
and the GrammaTech and SciTools corporations.

Speaker: Prem Devanbu
Prem Devanbu is Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis,
he joined UC Davis after almost 20 years in Industry, including 17 years
at AT Bell Labs and its various offshoots. He received his
undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering (Medium Current)
from IIT Chennai, India, and his M.S., and Ph.D from Rutgers University
in Piscataway, NJ.

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[Martintfre]

Why is government funding software development?

The industry is plenty profitable and does not need a subsidy.

[theoneenlightened]

Interdisciplinary? NOT

[rhon41890]

sgfsdg